


A Demon Walks Into A Nightclub

by Rurouni_Idoru



Series: Nil Enters the Crowley-verse [2]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, Good Omens Movie Script (1992) - Fandom
Genre: Comedy, Crack Treated Seriously, Gen, Good Omens Movie Script (1992), Parallel Universes, petty revenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-31
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:33:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24459763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rurouni_Idoru/pseuds/Rurouni_Idoru
Summary: Her reconnaissance had turned up a lot of information about him that made Nil dislike him more: He’d been a climber in the Hellish ranks, always seeking a promotion; he found humans dull and uninteresting, and inherently rotten; he was terrible with children; and he seemed to genuinely not give a shit about the planet Earth.But mostly, he was a real dick to Aziraphale.Nil uses her unique talents to put someone in his place.
Series: Nil Enters the Crowley-verse [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1768276
Comments: 7
Kudos: 15





	1. Phase One: Operation Proud Mary

Nil was noticing that, of late, she had gotten into something of a habit of getting into situations that made her feel nervous. She wasn’t crazy about that, given how she’d generally avoided that feeling for most of her tenure on Earth. But she couldn’t help it this time. She’d never done anything like this. She took a deep breath to steel herself before she walked in. If Aziraphale could do temptations, and Crowley could do blessings, then she could do… whatever the hell this would count as.

For starters, she was turning off her shielding to the humans. Which was tremendously uncomfortable, but it had to go this way. She sidled up to the bar and ordered a drink, which was normal enough: she generally had to be perceivable to receive service. But as she took a seat on the stool and sipped at her drink, she put out a slow, subtle pulse of _notice me, notice me, notice me_ in the bartender’s direction. It felt counter-intuitive and weird, but it was pretty essential that he break the ice.

And after another drink and a half, he did.

“You alright there, miss?” He smiled at her, during a lull. “Noticed you’ve been sittin’ there a while.”

“Oh,” Nil said, pretending to be surprised to have been noticed. “Oh, God, I must seem like a pathetic lonely drunk, sitting here by myself!” She broke into an approximation of nervous giggles.

“Just worried about you,” the bartender said.

“No, it’s — it’ll sound silly, but I’m trying to sort of… scope out the place, before I bring any of my friends here. Make sure it’s decent.” Nil grinned. “Had some pretty embarrassing experiences in the past, taking people places that turned out to suck.”

“Ah,” he said. “Well? What do you think of the place?”

“Not bad, not bad,” Nil said. “The theming’s a little much, though, isn’t it? I mean, it’s cute, but…” She cast a look out at a couple of the waitresses working the floor. “Being served drinks by good-lookin’ girls in red hot pants is, uh, _really not_ how I imagine Hell, if you know what I mean.” She let out a sophomoric little laugh, and threw another, vaguely-guilty-looking glance at one of said waitresses.

“Oh,” the bartender said, with a laugh.

“Kinda don’t know where to look,” Nil giggled. “I get the feeling you don’t have any problems not ogling the nice young women who work here, though, huh?”

“I — Am I that clockable?”

“Oh, c’mon, you know we can smell our own.” Which was sort of true, of demons. Not a smell, really, so much as some inhuman sense that someone really should have come up with a name for, by now. And Nil did sense a demonic presence in this place, but she knew it wasn’t coming from behind the bar.

This was step one: establish a rapport, and bond a little bit over a commonality that could also serve as a vulnerability. Nil was building up trust between them. It was important this temptation not _feel_ like one.

“I’m Nell, by the way,” she said, holding her hand out for him to shake.

“Nice to meet you, Nell,” he said, grasping it. “I’m Tina.” 

“Tina,” Nil repeated. “That your full name?” She knew it wasn’t. But she needed to hear him explain it.

“Short for Constantine,” he said. Because of course it was _._ “Back in uni I had a pretty infamous ‘Proud Mary’ lipsync routine, so my mates started calling me Tina, because… ”

“Ah, did this lipsync routine involve a shaking it out in a fringe dress?”

“Might have done,” Tina laughed.

“You do look like you'd queen up nice!” And as it was a slow night, slower than usual, _for some reason_ , Nil and Tina had plenty of time to chat about such things. Nil figured Tina didn’t get much opportunity to talk gay culture with the clientele of this place, anyway. It was a little on-the-nose, in terms of heteronormativity. Nil presumed the owner might be compensating a little.

After a little while of chatting and another drink, she asked him about her tab, and balked cartoonishly at the exorbitant drink prices. “Yikes, mighta spoke too soon, maybe this _is_ Hell,” she laughed. “Like that Twilight Zone episode! You lure me in with my vices and then twist on me like this.”

“Sorry, Nell, nothing I can do about the prices,” Tina replied with a sympathetic grin.

“You at least getting a nice cut of that outrageous markup?”

“Oh, I get by.”

“Ohh, I see,” Nil smirked. “You’re in cahoots with the boss.”

“I don’t know about _cahoots,_ ” Tina said. Which tracked: Nil thought _cahoots_ might be giving said boss more credit than he probably deserved. “He’s kind of an odd duck, actually.” He looked surprised to have said that out loud, but Nil wasn’t surprised at all to hear it. She adjusted the metaphysical volume on her broadcast: _I’m like you, you can trust me. You can tell me things you wouldn’t tell other people._

“Yeah? Like how?”

“Like, he wears sunglasses all the time. At night, inside, always.”

“I mean, that’s not _that_ weird. I kind of assume anybody who owns a nightclub probably has a coke habit on the side.” Tina guffawed, despite an evident effort not to. “That might be an American thing, though,” Nil admitted, chuckling.

“It’s all strange little things. Like, when I first interviewed, I thought it was going terribly, right up until I told him I went by Tina, ‘stead of Constantine.”

“I mean, _Constantine_ is kind of a mouthful, for tipsy bar patrons,” Nil conceded. Though Nil suspected the resistance was more theological than that. As though poor Tina here had anything to do with the Nicene Creed. Or maybe the owner knew something about comic books, and thought hiring a bartender with the same name as the _Hellblazer_ was maybe a bit of a bridge too far, even for him.

“An’ he says stuff, sometimes,” Tina continued. “Weird stuff. ‘They’re all sheep, Tina, people are stupid sheep.’ Like some kinda Bond villain.”

“Oof, that’s an unflattering impression.”

“That’s how he talks! He gets in these _moods_ and turns into… ”

“Capitalism personified?”

“Yeah!” Tina looked around conspiratorially, and leaned in closer to Nil, as though the music wouldn’t drown him out to everyone else. “An’ he’s got this… professor friend, right? Or, something. I think they’re friends, I don’t know. Comes over here sometimes, to talk to him. You never saw anyone look less like they belong here. Fussy as anything. You know how you said we can smell our own?”

“Mmn,” Nil nodded seriously, biting her bottom lip.

“Prof’s got it bad for the boss, I think. You’d have to be blind to miss it.” Nil winced. “I mean, maybe he is, with the glasses and all, but.”

“You think he’s stringing the guy along on purpose?”

“Dunno why I’m telling you this,” Tina said with a grimace. 

“Eh, it’s about time the bartender gets to vent, for once,” Nil said with her mouth. But metaphysically, what she said was, _I’m safe. You can keep telling me things. Tell me all about your boss. He sounds like a real piece of work._

“Think it might be an ego thing. I’ve been working here for years, and the poor blighter keeps coming around. I don’t know that Mister C. even likes him that much.”

“Tragic,” Nil said, and meant it.

“I feel bad for him, honestly. You hate to see it.” _And to see it for so long,_ Nil silently suggested. _Unable to say anything about it._

“This might seem kind of out of the blue, but…” And then, she switched on her temptation voice for real: the difference was nigh-indiscernible to human ears, aside from a hint of a silky sort of confidence one might describe as _seductive_ , if not for the obvious. “It kind of sounds like you’re not satisfied here. And I happen to know of a job opening in your line of work.” She slid a business card across the bar carefully, deliberately, and oozing a background energy of _you can trust me, we’re such good friends now, just trust me._ “If you call this place, and tell them you’re interested in the bartender job, I guarantee that not only will they hire you, they will pay you double what you’re making here. It’s in Soho. The clientele will be much more… our speed, if you get me.”

Tina took the card and examined it, looking skeptical. _Trust me, trust me,_ Nil silently chanted. _It’s everything you’ve ever wanted in a gig._ “What’s in it for you, if I do that?”

Nil rolled her eyes back in her head and held her hands out at her sides, dropping her voice several octaves. _“Your immortal soul,”_ she intoned in her best Baphomet (which was probably closer to Beetlejuice, really), before snapping back to normal. “Nah, seriously? I have friends in that neighborhood who just want to see a little local culture come back to the place. Gentrification’s a bitch, you know. All the non-corporate places really gotta step up their game to stay in business. And you clearly have game.”

“It just seems too good to be true, is all.”

“Tina,” Nil said, smirking, “I promise, it is absolutely not _too good_ to be true.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look, sometimes, you read something so appalling you have to write incredibly self-indulgent fanfiction in which your OC commits corporate espionage for revenge purposes. And sometimes, strangers on the internet who have read the appalling thing were also so appalled that they encourage you to share it. And then sometimes the author of the appalling thing (who hates it just as much as you do) says that there are legal issues with the appalling thing having been shared, but by that point you're already in too deep and you have to finish this stupid self-indulgent story or it will keep you up at night. 
> 
> Script!Crowley is the Worst Crowley. And Nil barely manages not to punch the Crowley she _likes_ in the face on a regular basis.


	2. Phase Two: Operation Gloria Steinem

Nil waited for Tina’s two weeks’ notice to run out before she returned to the Hellfire Club. The management had found a replacement, sure; bartenders weren’t hard to come by in the London area. But the new hire obviously didn’t compare: Tina had been there for over a decade. He was a fixture. Spirits among the staff weren’t exactly high. Phase One of Nil’s plan had gone off without a hitch.

In her head, she was calling Phase Two of this plan “Operation Gloria Steinem.” Though she wasn’t actually planning to slip into one of those red imp uniforms herself. Actually getting hired and making her way onto the waitstaff would give her away much too early: she didn't want her demonic nature to be revealed to her target until the grand crescendo at the end. She'd considered trying it anyway, accessorizing with some mildly holy object like a mass-produced rosary to suppress her infernality, but that would rob her of her miracles and itch like a bastard to boot. And she didn’t think her corporation really had the right figure for the hot pants, anyway. 

This time, Nil didn’t need to miraculously contrive an opening. Drunk patrons getting handsy with the waitresses was depressingly common. Sure enough, she wasn’t there fifteen minutes before she spotted some schmuck pulling at the pointed tail on one of the girls’ costumes. Jesus Christ, music and decor aside, it was like it was still the 1970s in here; maybe it’d be worth it to try and score some ludes once she was done with this.

“Hey, hey!” Nil called at him over the bass-heavy music. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Don’t touch the waitresses!” For good measure, she gave his shoulder a light shove.

The man made a face, and furiously stalked off grumbling something that included the phrases _“humorless bitches”_ and _“witch hunts”_ and _“ugly anyway.”_ Nil placidly grinned at his retreating back.

“You alright?” she asked the woman adjusting her tail to lay properly again.

“Yeah, thanks.”

“What an _asshole,_ ” Nil shouted. She had to admit, there was something a little exhilarating about coming to someone’s rescue like a dashing rogue. Maybe a certain couple of idiots she knew were on to something. “That happen often?”

“It’s the tail,” the waitress said, smiling again now. “Looks just enough like a handle to short out their brains or something.”

“I got his picture,” Nil said, which wasn’t entirely true, but a clear photo of him had, indeed, somehow found its way onto her camera roll, because there were certain perks to being inhuman. “I’m blasting that dude’s face all over Twitter, I hope you know.” 

“For all the good it’ll do,” the waitress replied. Which might have been a good point, if she weren't speaking to a demon who figured she might as well engage in a little side torture. After all, if guys like that were going to complain about getting their lives ruined by hysteria, Nil figured she might as well give them what they were anticipating. “I owe you a drink for that. What’s your name?”

“Nell,” Nil said.

“Lilith,” the waitress replied. Let it never be said that the owner of this establishment did not commit to a theme. “What’ll you have?”

“Oh, you don’t need to —”

“No, it’s on me, love, c’mon.”

“I’ve already had a few, just give me a Shirley Temple.” Really, Nil was kind of feeling a glass of straight grenadine, but that was an order that tended to raise a few eyebrows, when people were aware of her. “Extra cherries, though,” she added with a smile. 

Given that her introduction to Lilith had been to rescue her from some tool who was being creepy, Nil very much did not want to come off as creepy herself. So she pulled back after receiving her thank-you drink. She drank her fruity soda, ate her cherries (stem and all), and set about enjoying the rest of her evening at the club. Mostly by screwing with the other patrons.

Unfortunately, Nil had no luck finding any humans selling ludes, but she'd figured that was a long shot anyway. More importantly, the start of her plan to get in good with the wait staff seemed to come together nicely. After the Hellfire Club closed for the night, Nil made sure she was still loitering outside the building.

“Oh hey,” Lilith said, now dressed in street clothes instead of that cute-but-tacky uniform that bordered on something like racial insensitivity to Nil specifically. “Shirley Temple with extra cherries, my knight in shining armor!”

“Oh, knight in shining armor, psh,” Nil demurred. “I just saw a chance to use my rude bitch powers constructively for once.”

“What are you doing out here still?”

“I lost my friggin’ earring,” Nil groaned with a smile. Never mind that she hadn’t been wearing earrings; her ears were perpetually hidden under her hair. “I’ve been all up and down this damn hill looking for the stupid thing for hours. Really, I shoulda called it a loss and went home ages ago.”

“Oh, that’s a shame,” Lilith said, and she sounded so genuine that Nil almost felt a little bad for making her an unwitting pawn in her scheme. Almost. “Bet your legs are tired after all that. Which way you going? Maybe we could split a cab or something.” Nil skimmed the proper direction off the top of Lilith’s mind like a drowned moth in a swimming pool. They did indeed share a cab.

She wasn’t looking to build a whole friendship here. This was going to be a chance encounter, a funny story that Lilith would tell her friends later. It was a more romantic story that way, and humans liked romantic stories. Nil wasn’t going to be Lilith’s new friend, Nil would be a minor inspiration.

All it would take was a little mutual griping about shitty jobs: swapped horror stories of menial customer service positions. (Sure, Nil had stolen hers from internet forums, but they’d happened to _someone._ Probably.) After a little of that, all Nil would have to do was drop a single sentence. 

“Have you ever thought about unionizing?”

The rest was fluff: Lilith would barely remember it when she looked back on the evening. Nil made up a bunch of bullshit about how much her work life had improved since unionizing, most of it aspirational, but the important thing was the idea. Nil implanted that niggling little thought into Lilith’s brain, and saw to it that it wouldn’t go away. After all, Lilith’s _knight in shining armor_ had suggested it, in the backseat of a taxi shared in solidarity. It was like the modern-day, class-struggle version of Cinderella’s pumpkin coach. And then, like Cinderella, Nil would disappear into the night with a pleasant goodbye but no contact information or even a real name to put to a face. She was a plot device in Lilith’s own personal working-class fairytale.

The rest was a cakewalk. Nil, to her immense relief, turned her imperceptibility back on and continued lurking around the Hellfire Club. Every time any minor workplace inconvenience plagued Lilith, Nil was at her side, softly murmuring something like, _“Is this job determined to take every scrap of your dignity?”_ or _“Don’t you feel so powerless like this?”_ or _“I bet your boss never worries about making his rent.”_

When Lilith brought up the idea to some of her co-workers, Nil knew she had as good as won the fight already. Then it was only a matter of scaling up her temptation efforts, expanding to whisper in the other girls’ ears as well. Just to speed things along, she even double-timed it and tempted patrons into irresponsible, inconsiderate behavior, to give the waitresses more reason to be disgruntled. She amplified and preyed upon the dark human desire to be kind of a shithead asshole to those working in service positions. Inside the walls of the Hellfire Club, Nil saw to it that inveterate tippers metamorphosed into entitled jerks who shouted and stiffed and demanded comped drinks for very little reason.

And then, she could slip into the locker room and stoke the waitresses’ fury.

 _“Wow, Joanne,”_ she said, to a woman who had no idea she was in the room, _“you really went above and beyond for that group at table six who were flashing cash around all night, and they didn’t leave you a damn penny extra, huh?”_

“Tightwads,” Joanne muttered, to herself, not realizing she was in the middle of a conversation.

 _“You earned a little something extra,”_ Nil continued, _“either from those bougie bastards at table six, or that bougie bastard who signs your paychecks. Maybe Lilith was on to something with that union idea.”_

“Maybe Lilith was on to something with that union idea,” Joanne repeated under her breath, slamming her locker shut.

“What’s that?” another waitress asked.

 _“Oh, hey, Vanessa,”_ Nil grinned, leaning backward to get closer to her. _“Joanne was just thinking about how bullshit it is that Mister C. is out here marking up the drink prices like a thousand percent or whatever, and yet you haven’t seen a raise in ages.”_

“Nothing, Vanessa,” Joanne answered. “Just… well, doesn’t it feel a little unfair, sometimes?

_“Doesn’t it, Vanessa?”_

“…Yeah, it sort of does,” Vanessa said, thoughtfully.

 _“That Lilith might have a point,”_ Nil announced to the room, stretching like a bored cat. _“Maybe it’s time to take Mister C. down a couple pegs, show him who really runs this place.”_

“I mean, I really do think I’m due for a pay rise. Not like there isn’t plenty of money coming into the place.”

“Shh, keep your voice down. Mister Crowley’ll hear you.”

“Well, maybe he _should._ ”

They couldn’t see Nil’s toothy, incredibly satisfied grin, but they felt an odd sort of satisfaction themselves. The revolution was beginning. Nil left them to it. Wouldn’t do to use too heavy a hand.


	3. Phase Three: Operation Bread and Roses

Nil had never met Anthony Crowley, owner and proprietor of the Hellfire Club. She was, begrudgingly, rather fond of _an_ Anthony Crowley. But _that_ Crowley sure as heaven didn’t own and operate a goddamn nightclub, and if he did it definitely wouldn’t be Hell-themed. Well, maybe if he left the day-to-day running of the place to someone else; he did have kind of a weird sense of humor that way, but, no, _this_ Crowley seemed to actually involve himself in the business.

She only knew _this_ Crowley by reputation. And it was a bad reputation. Not in the Joan Jett, punk-rock, “ooh-look-how-badass-and-wicked-he-is” kind of bad reputation that demons generally strove for, either. He just seemed like a run-of-the-mill asshole, but immortal and with magic powers, and way more prone to sucking up to the boss than any other incarnation of Crowley Nil had ever met or could imagine. (The Crowley she knew, the one she thought of as the Real Crowley, had always seemed uncomfortable at best with the boss’ favor, as it came with strings and that was often just as bad as his displeasure. One of the many problems with working for the literal Devil.) Her reconnaissance had turned up a lot of information about him that made Nil dislike him more: He’d been a climber in the Hellish ranks, always seeking a promotion; he found humans dull and uninteresting, and inherently rotten; he was terrible with children; and he seemed to genuinely not give a shit about the planet Earth.

But mostly, he was a real dick to Aziraphale. And everything else, Nil could just side-eye and shrug off, but that was the one thing she absolutely could not let stand unpunished. It would be bad enough if this Crowley was a rude shit to Real Aziraphale, _Aziraphale Prime,_ as it were, but Nil at least had faith in his ability to give as good as he got. Real Aziraphale, Nil’s favorite angel, was a soft, sweet peach, but he retained that stone pit at his core, full of poison if you managed to breach it. But somehow, the alternate Aziraphale who’d been saddled with this Crowley was apparently just a cream puff straight through. Totally hapless.

And Nil, much to her own annoyance, had discovered she had kind of a soft spot for well-meaning haplessness.

So, naturally, this son of a bitch had to go down in spectacular flames. Not just because Nil didn’t like him, but because his Aziraphale almost certainly wasn’t about to stand up for himself any time soon, so Nil had to do it for him. And Nil knew pricks like that didn’t learn subtle lessons.

Which was why Nil kept pushing the waitresses. Because, as satisfying as it always was, to see a band of lower-ranking individuals come together against a boss who really didn’t deserve such power, and form a powerful Stick-It-To-The-Man machine out of their disparate parts, it wasn’t enough this time. Not flashy enough, not as comeuppance for Crowley, and not enough to sate Nil’s personal beef against him.

If that was enough, Nil could have stopped at luring Tina away. She could have stopped at organizing the wait staff and cutting into Crowley’s profit margins. But Nil wanted a _meltdown._

The waitresses had to be made irate enough to go on strike.

(Once they did that, Nil could, finally, stop playing the ouroboros game of tempting patrons to be nasty, tempting the waitresses to indulge their fury and be nasty right back, tempting onlookers to be judgemental and enact punishment on either party, and tempting the customers to retaliate and so on. Sure, it racked up points in her favor at work, but she wasn’t here to _work_ ; this was _extracurricular_ vengeance. And she didn’t like encouraging people to be shitty to bottom-rung workers anyway: it felt too much like self-sabotage, when she could be ruining powerful people’s lives instead.)

Luckily for Nil, humans were pretty susceptible to suggestion. Especially when that suggestion was _“fuck your boss; you should do a walk-out, that'll show him,”_ chanted by a demon consistently over several nights of repeated indignities.

They waited until a Friday to stage it, for maximum visible drama. Nil brimmed with pride about that.

Anthony Crowley, owner and proprietor of the Hellfire Club, arrived through the back door not long before opening to find the place nearly entirely empty. No waitresses. No one working on the sound systems. No inexperienced new bartender.

“Where is everyone,” Crowley grumbled, to himself, of course, because he had not noticed the one person-shaped being lurking in the empty nightclub. She answered him anyway, though.

“Oh, I’m afraid the Hellfire Club is empty, Mister Crowley,” Nil smirked from her louche lean in the doorway, wearing one of the waitresses’ horned headbands. “All the devils are here.” She jerked her head towards the front door, outside of which a picket line of beautiful young women had formed. Wordlessly, Crowley rushed to follow her out the front door and took in the scene: Many of the waitresses were holding signs emblazoned with puns about Hellish working conditions. Some were handing out leaflets to passersby. The other employees were standing by in solidarity, and a little bit in fear of what might happen to them if they crossed this particular picket line, prompted by an unplaceable voice in their heads.

“What the Heaven is all this?” Crowley gaped.

“Oh, are you not familiar?” Nil said, feigning an airy innocence. “It’s called a labor strike, Mister Crowley. Your employees are unhappy.” He turned to look at her, properly, as if for the first time. His eyes were wide enough with outrage that someone who knew what to look for, as Nil did, could spot his vertical-slit pupils even through the dark glasses. Nil smiled at him, letting her teeth go just a little more fang-like than she usually did on Earth, for dramatic effect. 

“Who in Hell are you,” he breathed. It was very emphatically not a rhetorical question. 

Nil had been waiting for this moment. She’d thought about it since that first night when she chatted with Tina. She’d drafted and scrapped several versions of planned responses. Finally, at last, she’d arrived at the perfect one, the one she could deliver with cool aplomb and put this pretender Crowley right into his place. A devastating, protracted bout of gloating about being the menace systematically ruining Crowley’s business, including a purloined line from a Bond flick, just to really hit him in his fanboy-ism, where she knew it hurt. (Specifically, _“It’s always been me. The author of all your pain.”_ )

And that all went out the window in the moment, and instead, she blurted, “How _dare_ you treat Aziraphale like that, you _unbelievable_ motherfucker?” Admittedly, she had been intending to save the Aziraphale bomb for after she’d gotten further into his head, but she’d been holding it in for much too long. “After everything — _everything_ he’s done for you! Everything he lets you get away with!”

“Azira— Did _Aziraphale_ send you out here to do this?”

“Of course not!” Nil was shrieking already, and she was really hoping she would have built to that a little more slowly, but it was what it was. “He would _never!_ Aziraphale’s a _good person!_ Which is why you should _appreciate_ him, you scaly bastard!” But this Crowley’s corresponding Aziraphale was, in fact, on his way. Nil had seen to it: she’d forged a message from Crowley informing Aziraphale that a car was being sent for him, briefly considered attempting to explain what Uber was, and then thought better of it. Presently, this Aziraphale was sitting in the backseat of a stranger's car, making small talk with his driver about something nice. Baked goods or something, maybe.

“Look, I don’t know what he’s told you, but it can’t be worth all this!” Crowley gestured around at the scene: the wait staff was starting up a chant now. “Sabotaging another demon! It’s ridiculous! It’s no way to get ahead, Downstairs!”

Nil reflexively, and very dramatically, spat on the ground at his implication that any of this was to _get ahead Downstairs._ This seemed to catch him off guard, because he flinched and looked at her like she was a crazy person, which might have been a fair reaction, since that did probably look kind of weird to a variant Crowley who didn’t know Nil. But Nil didn’t care about fair, in the moment. “You imply I do anything for that bitch Satan's approval again and I’ll make you into so many goddamn belts and a big purse to hold all the belts in!” She shook her head violently, as if to cast out the very thought. “All that ass-kissery and brown-nosing corporate climbing, outta you! Disgusting! All excited for a _promotion,_ of all things!”

“I didn’t take it!”

“Yeah, at the last possible second! You were totally prepared to just swan off to Alpha Centauri and leave everyone else to Armageddon!”

“Are you really upset about the humans? You know what they’re like!” Nil almost took the bait. She resisted the urge to go off on a tangent about how they were standing in the midst of a wildcat strike, that it was a perfect demonstration of how weird and contradictory and occasionally _really interesting_ humans could be. But his disdain for humans wasn’t the target of her ire, here.

“I don’t give a shit what you think about everybody else on this mudball! They choose their choices and that’s on them!” Not that she’d give this prick the satisfaction of saying so out loud, but some days, between reminders about the cool things humans could do, she could even kind of agree with his misanthropy. Sometimes Nil was baffled that God didn’t just give up on humans entirely and focus on penguins instead. (Hell, maybe She had, actually.) “But Aziraphale chooses to do the kind thing, every damn time! Even when his Head Office doesn’t want him to! He chooses to be kind _to you!_ ” Which was why Nil wanted his Aziraphale here to witness this: she knew that as Crowley was brought low, no matter how humiliated he was, Aziraphale would choose kindness once again. Maybe that would be something better than humiliating: maybe it would be _humbling_. 

And if Crowley decided to continue being an asswipe to the angel who least deserved it, well, Nil had a decent contingency plan to get Aziraphale a better friend, at least.

“And by the way,” Nil continued shouting at Crowley, “there’s cop cars all over London with fully-inflated tires, and you use demonic miracles to _cheat at checkers?_ Eight-year-olds can cheat at checkers, no magic required! And, you know, at least when you cheat at chess or Monopoly or whatever, there’s some kinda strategy involved! But _checkers?!_ You should be ashamed of yourself!”

“You did this because I waste miracles on checkers?”

“No, I did this because you're an asshole!”

He gestured at his own chest and shouted, “ _Demon!_ ” by way of explanation.

“Being a demon doesn't mean you have to be a shitty friend!”

“Oh, what, because you're such a pal?”

“Me? Hell no! I mean, I think I am kinda killing it with this vengeance thing, but no, I barely know what I'm doing half the time! _You!_ You can be better! I've seen it!” She tried very hard not to think about someone with a near-identical metaphysical presence having a heart-to-heart with her as she sat sopping on a park bench, because she did not have time to get all sentimental. “If it was just about the wasted miracles,” she added venomously, “I woulda stopped at poaching Tina.”

“You — !” Crowley sputtered at her. “ _You’re_ why Tina left? This new idiot I had to hire can barely make a screwdriver properly!” Nil decided now would be a good time to weave her way into the crowd, so he was less likely to try and hurt her. The boss throttling a picketer would be really bad optics, after all.

Aziraphale fidgeted in the back of the car. There was something of a ruckus going on outside the club, which was unexpected.

“Is that a picket line, outside of the Hellfire Club?” he asked the driver unsteadily.

“Looks like,” the driver answered, equally fidgety. “Hopefully it's nothing too serious.” The cheerful Buddy Holly song that had been playing came to an end as they slowed to get a better look, and another song started up in its place.

 _“Tonight, I'm gonna have myself a real good time,”_ Freddie Mercury crooned from the speakers.

“Damn,” muttered the driver, poking at the phone attached by wire to the cassette slot.

“Something wrong, dear boy?”

_“I feel ali-i-i-ive…”_

“Just… not the song I had queued up, is all,” the driver answered, voice betraying something rather more worrisome than that. “Should be fine,” he added, completely unconvincingly.

Ensconced in the picket line, Nil decided it was time to encourage a bit of wrath. _There's that shithead boss of yours, girls! Within striking distance!_ But really, honestly and truly, no matter how little she’d be believed when she told this story later, she had nothing to do with the presence of the tomatoes in Lilith's backpack. Which wasn't to say she wasn't impressed; they were just a surprise. That Lilith was a clever woman, apparently, like her namesake.

Crowley, despite everything else, wasn't an idiot. When the first tomato hit him, he didn’t even look in the direction it had come from. Instead, he made a beeline through the crowd toward Nil. 

“Are you doing this?” he hissed, though they both knew the answer. There was no missing Nil's demonic suggestion. Another tomato splashed Crowley with red goo as he pushed past enough of his own employees to reach Nil. “Knock it off! Make them stop!” He grabbed her by the front of her shirt, furious. That, she figured, met the plausible deniability threshold just fine.

It was in this instant that several things happened at once. 

For one, Aziraphale's taxi arrived on the scene: a Citroen 2CV, driven by a nervous-looking young man.

For another, Aziraphale flipped open his window, to try and get a better idea of what exactly was happening outside the club, inadvertently exposing the scene outside to the song playing on the car's radio: _“So, don't — stop — me — now…”_

For a third was the most important thing of all: Nil hauled back and punched Crowley in the face. 

Crowley, for his part, had not been attacked by anything stronger than an angry human for centuries, the Antichrist incident aside. So he was out of practice and taken by surprise by an attack from another, roughly equally physically powerful demon. Which doesn't even factor in that Nil was channeling not just her anger at Crowley, but at everything that had been unfair to Aziraphale, _any Aziraphale,_ that she had not yet been able to punch in the face. The power of this haymaker was meant for the Archangels who'd tried to have her favorite angel executed just as much as it was for this shitty Crowley, he was just the most convenient outlet.

Which was all to say, Nil pretty easily kicked Crowley's ass. He reeled and sprawled across the pavement, making nonsense noises as was the standard Crowley custom. The women in the picket line cheered raucously as the tempo to the song playing from the 2CV ratcheted up.

_“Havin’ a good time, havin’ a good time!”_

“Crowley!” gasped Aziraphale, and in seconds, he was out of the car, door still open behind him, to rush to Crowley’s side. “Oh, Crowley, my dear boy, are you alright?” Aziraphale gingerly touched at the red spatter across Crowley’s face. “Why, you’re bleeding!”

“‘M not bleeding, angel,” Crowley groaned as Aziraphale knelt down and hauled him into his lap. “S’only tomatoes.”

_“Tomatoes?”_

“Oh, would you look at that,” Nil shouted, eyeing the car, “my Uber just arrived! I'm out! Good luck, ladies!” She scrambled into the door Aziraphale had left open and crashed into the backseat. “Ey, Crawleigh, get this Flintstone-mobile going, c’mon!”

 _“I’m gonna go, go, go, there’s no stopping me!”_ agreed the music in the car.

“Can I please take off the wig and the rosary now?” Crawleigh asked, turning to watch her pull her legs in and shut the door. “It's just, they both itch terribly.”

“Fine, fine! It doesn’t matter if he notices you’re a demon now anyway.” Nil stuck her head out of the open window to call to Aziraphale as he delicately wiped tomato pulp off Crowley’s face. “Hey! Don’t ever let him make you feel like anything less than a rock star, alright?”

“What?” He looked up, utterly baffled.

“He ever calls you too stupid to live again, or whatever the hell he said, I’ll be back and next time I’ll break his shades!” She thrust her arm out the window, to point emphatically. “Love yourself, Aziraphale! You’re worth it!” 

“Lovely meeting you,” Crawleigh called out his own window, as he pulled off the blond wig he'd been wearing to disguise his resemblance to Crowley. “I'll swing by the museum some time, shall I?”

“Flirt later, Crawleigh,” Nil groaned. “I'm trying to avoid a retaliatory ass-kicking, here!”

“I'm not _flirting_ ,” Crawleigh said, blushing furiously. “We got to chatting, and he said he'd be interested in trying my apple dumplings!” It was almost worse, that Nil knew that wasn't a euphemism.

“Just focus!” She turned to look at Aziraphale again, still dumbfounded and cradling Crowley’s tomato-splattered head. “You're the best of all of them, don't forget it! Don’t bury that light under a bushel for some ain’t-shit snake!”

“…Who are you?”

“She’s the one who started this riot!” Which Nil felt was really melodramatic on Crowley’s part; Nil had started plenty of _actual_ riots in her time. This was a skirmish at best. Still, she ducked back into the car and shut the window. 

“Hey, what gives? Why aren’t we moving?” 

“I can’t drive and take all this off at the same time,” Crawleigh protested, pulling pins from his hair.

“The Hell you can’t,” Nil shouted, and snapped her fingers. Crawleigh screamed as the car, quite without his input, pulled into traffic and started driving itself.

_“I'm a rocketship on my way to Mars, on a collision course!”_

“Ohgodohshit, Nil what are you doing?”

“Ha! I bet I could get this thing over forty now!”

“ _Shaitan,_ Nil, _no,_ stop being a backseat driver! Let me drive the car properly!”

“Then hurry up and _take the wheel_ before those dumbasses remember they have wings!”

“Why did I agree to this?” Crawleigh cried, attempting to wrest control back from the car.

“Because you have no spine,” Nil grinned, climbing over the seat to sit up front.

“Nil, _please_ stop trying to get us discorporated!” Nil thudded into the passenger seat, cackling. “And I resent that remark! Serpents are almost _entirely_ spine.”

“Yeah, a very bendy one,” Nil conceded. “…You tell that nice angel about how bendy you can get?”

_“Nil!”_

“Ooh, did they get you with the tomatoes too, or is that red face all you?” Without waiting for an answer, she joined in singing: _“Two hundred degrees, that’s why they call me Mister Fahrenheit! I’m travelin’ at the speed of liiiight!”_

And so ended Phase Three of Nil’s plan: A getaway drive that topped out at around forty miles per hour, howling Queen lyrics at a much more tolerable alternate Crowley.


	4. Phase Four: There Is No Phase Four

There wasn’t really a Phase Four as such, but Nil did have kind of a _de facto_ finisher for everything she did in London, these days. 

“So at this point, I’m totally ready for the cool escape, right?” She paused to put the wine glass on one of the side tables that was slightly less covered in books, so as to frantically gesture without spilling. “But Crawleigh’s still taking off his friggin’ wig cap, like, ‘I can’t drive and do this at the same time, it wouldn’t be _saaafe!_ ’”

“It wouldn’t!” Crawleigh protested. “I haven’t got enough hands for that!”

“You’re right, I shouldn’t make fun of you for not being able to shapeshift,” Nil laughed, “but I will _definitely_ make fun of you for that noise you made when I set the car moving anyway!”

“You _didn’t,_ ” Real Crowley grinned wolfishly in a way that indicated he really, really hoped she did. “See, angel, she can be taught!”

“Oh, good, exactly what I needed,” Real Aziraphale said, evidently trying his best to look prim and disapproving rather than delighted, and doing a lousy job of it. “Another demon seeking to recreate the chariot scene in _Ben-Hur_ every time we go anywhere.”

“Ah, don’t get your bow-tie in a twist,” Nil said, reaching for her wine again, over Crowley’s mumbled protests that the comparison was a bit dramatic. “I’m not interested in driving, that was an extenuating circumstance.” She couldn’t imagine abandoning mass transit for personal transportation any time soon: she liked subway rats too much for that. “I just _really_ did not want to do all that and then have the multiverse’s worst Crowley catch up to me and kick my ass.”

“Oh,” Crawleigh piped up, “is that a tacit admission that I’m not the worst one?”

“Quit fishin’ for compliments,” Nil said. “You haven’t been the worst one since you started letting me have your failed jam experiments, and you know that shit. Ooh, actually, I bet Other Aziraphale would be way into some homemade jam, when you go visit him at the museum!”

“Talking of which, Nil,” Regular, Non-Other Aziraphale interjected, “I’ve been meaning to ask you: after all that effort you went to, why didn’t you befriend him, er, me… er, the _other Aziraphale,_ yourself?”

“You kiddin’ me?” Nil scoffed. “I can barely structurally handle _one_ of you being all nice to me all the time. I think my bones might actually rot and fall apart if I had to juggle two of you.”

“I just worry,” Aziraphale said, “not that your vengeance quest wasn’t terribly impressive, but what if that Other Crowley hasn’t taken the right lesson from it all? He could go on being… odious, to that poor Other Aziraphale.”

“Aha,” Nil said, throwing her shoulders back, “therein lies the brilliance of my plan! I’m sure you’re wondering why I called in Crawleigh here as my getaway driver, despite that he drives _that_ friggin’ thing.”

“No, not really,” Crowley answered. “You only know two people who have cars, and of the two of us, Crawleigh’s at least _less_ functionally identical to the prick you punched in the face.”

“I mean, that was a factor, as was the fact that _I_ wanted to punch him in the face and you probably would have climbed over me to do it yourself and stolen my thunder,” and Crowley nodded while making a face that very plainly communicated the phrase _fair enough_ , “but also, I wanted to give Other Aziraphale a chance to talk to someone more his speed, who wouldn’t be a total ass-waffle to him! Enter Crawleigh, the friendly fake-Uber driver!”

“You know, I did actually try Uber, for a while, to make a little side money,” Crawleigh said, staring off into the middle-distance, “but after the fifth passenger who thought it was some kind of YouTube prank when I pulled up, I gave it a miss.”

“I don’t know why everyone reacts that way, it’s a perfectly charming little car,” Aziraphale huffed.

“See? I knew what I was doing,” Nil said. “I can bait an Aziraphale trap just fine.” She had considered placing an E.M. Forster first edition and a pretentious bottle of red wine in the backseat of Crawleigh’s car as well, but decided it might be a little heavy-handed. “Besides,” Nil continued, throwing an arm roughly around Crawleigh’s shoulders, “the kid needs more friends.” Ideally, friends who weren’t practically-married weirdos who’d spent so much time together they didn’t know how to behave with anyone but each other, or a third weirdo who had only learned companionship from the first two.

“You know we’re all the same age, right?” Crawleigh said, making no move to pull her arm off him. “‘M not a kid, compared to any of you.” Nil ignored his protests and lifted her hand from his shoulders to give him a little noogie in answer to that technicality.

“So now, ideally,” Nil said, as Crawleigh batted her hand from his head, “a certain formerly-very-unlucky angel will now have both a reformed bastard and _this_ little sweetheart, competing for his affections!”

“That does sound quite romantic,” Aziraphale said indulgently, and Nil thought so too, at least by her admittedly inexperienced standards. For someone who’d never even attempted romance before, she thought she’d done pretty well.

“Think that might qualify as a good deed,” Crowley smirked.

“Hey, no no no,” Nil protested, “Helping a demon get laid is absolutely not a good deed, and I'll thank you not to call it that while I'm still employed by the forces of evil!”

“Understandable,” Crowley said, “but you know, that kind of makes it worse: it's just a nice thing to do for a friend.”

Nil grinned and put up her fists threateningly. “Oh, you want some of this heat too? Is that it?” She shadowboxed a little bit in his direction. “‘Cause I could lay out Crowleys all day, let's go!”

“I wish you'd stop talking like that anyway,” Crawleigh said, face now hidden so thoroughly behind his hands that the only glimpses of him beyond his hair were his bright-red ears. “No one's _getting laid,_ alright?”

“No, that's right,” Nil said, “none of that until the third date, at _least._ ”

 _“Nil,”_ Crawleigh groaned for what might have been the fiftieth time that day.

“And if he tries to pressure you into puttin' out, you tell him to go sit on a fuckin' cactus, y’hear me? You don't need friends like that. Not that I think he will!” Nil held up her hands defensively. “I just think it’d be smart to be cautious around an Aziraphale who hasn’t spent all of human history as a practicing hedonist. I mean, who knows how all that repression could backfire once he’s off the leash, y’know?”

“Right, nothing's going to happen, because I'm going to discorporate out of embarrassment before I can see him again, thanks.” Crawleigh ran his hands up his face and back through his hair, fingers dragging over his own scalp. “Solves the issue of not knowing what to do with my hair when I go over there, at least.”

“Do you _hear_ yourself?” Nil crowed, getting up to take a quick turn around the room just to burn off her excess delight at his embarrassment. 

“If you ask me, and I think in this case you really ought to,” Aziraphale said, “your hair looks fine the way you wear it normally. Not that it particularly matters, as long as you bring those apple dumplings.”

“I just feel like it always looks like I don't know what to do with it," Crawleigh said, fiddling with it now. He was right, though, it did look like he didn't know what to do with it. Presumably because he didn't. “And after the wig and all, I wanted to make a better impression, you know.”

“Alright, alright,” Crowley said dramatically, like anybody had been speaking to him specifically, “I’ll help you out with the hair thing.” See, this was the exact sort of thing that made Nil not want to punch him in the face: the Real Crowley, for all his posturing, was ultimately a pile of sentimental mush wrapped up in snakeskin and skinny jeans. “D’you mind if we use your bathroom, angel?” He nodded toward the staircase that Nil had still never had occasion to ascend.

“Oh, very well. But do be careful,” Aziraphale said. “The counter’s a bit… cluttered.” Given the usual state of the bookshop, Nil figured this meant the bathroom counter was probably beyond human reckoning.

“Of course,” Crowley said, rising and pulling Crawleigh by the arm to follow him. 

“Huh,” Nil stated, as the two vanished up the stairs. “I always kinda figured he just used miracles to do his hair.”

“He does.” Nil turned to look at Aziraphale: he was checking his pocket watch. “I’m going to give them ten minutes before I intervene. Otherwise, I suspect they’ll just hurt themselves.”

“I mean, that could be fun to watch, too.”

“You do know you don’t have to resort to violence on my behalf, don’t you?” Aziraphale said, like he hadn’t heard her. “As much fun as your little caper undoubtedly was. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the sentiment, but….”

“I know where my skills are,” Nil shrugged. “I’m good at wrecking shit for people who suck. An’ hey, real talk, any of those dickhead angels come back and bother you again, you call me right up. It’s two birds with one stone if I can lay hands on those fuckwads!”

“Nil, dear, I don’t think you’d fare particularly well against a cadre of Archangels.”

“Oh, of course not, they’d kill the shit outta me,” Nil said, grinning wickedly, “but I’d take big chunks of Gabriel with me in my teeth when I went!” 

He beamed at her, that oh-is- _this_ -why-Crowley-wears-the-sunglasses smile of his, and looked as though he was about to say something, but it was interrupted by a sound upstairs that was almost certainly some glass container shattering, and a muffled vocalization that could only have been Crowley swearing. Aziraphale’s face fell, and he sighed just a little.

“Perhaps I’d better make it five minutes, if I don’t want all my toiletries ruined.”

“Mm,” Nil nodded.


End file.
